About this column

Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. His columns, which appear twice a month in the U-T’s Sunday Business section, are entertaining visits with some of the smartest minds around San Diego. These are people ahead of the wave, with a wise eye on the past, and something very readable to say about the news of today.

Chaos takes many forms to Sugihara. He finds order in disorder, meaning in madness. Fascinated by complex systems, a self-described “kind of half-bank, half-ecologist guy,” he applies the underlying principles of advanced mathematics to the seemingly disparate worlds of biology and high finance.

In June, when the European debt crisis began in earnest and many very important people on both sides of the Atlantic were feeling the first tingling frisson of real fear, Sugihara, 61, jumped a plane from San Diego to Frankfurt and laid out some of his ideas to the heads of the European Central Bank. Simple stuff, you might say, to Sugihara, like the paradox of diversification, the homogenization of the global financial system, how connectivity whether in large banks or fish stocks holds the potential for systemic destabilization, how hyper- connectivity can crash a system, and has, and even how this can be charted.

Sugihara’s ideas, and those of Robert May, his co-author on several now-legendary papers concerning chaos theory and financial markets, have influenced the way the world’s banks and the U.S. Federal Reserve view risk, as well as infusing the Dodd-Frank bill with fresh thinking. Sugihara even has some calm and worrisome thoughts as to whether the world really is on its way out of the current downturn — or not.

Back in the day, the ’80s, Sugihara was a killer young mathematician from the University of Michigan with a yen for biological phenomena, studying lake cores in Africa.

He met up with a then-almost-famous mathematician named Bob May at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. (May eventually became Lord Robert May, Baron of Oxford, chief scientific adviser to the government of England, and president of the Royal Society.) After Sugihara became a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (he now holds the McQuown Chair in Natural Science) the two came up with an influential little paper called “Nonlinear Forecasting As a Way of Distinguishing Chaos From Measurement Error in Time Series.”

To this day, Sugihara is a little embarrassed by the title: “Too flashy.”

Even though the paper was the featured article in Nature, the gold standard of the scientific world, some scientists were a little, “I don’t know about this, I mean really.”

But people on Wall Street immediately understood the implications.

There’s a story that Sugihara was brought to a country estate in England, where a banker wrote him an offer on a napkin. The offer was so high that Sugihara was speechless, so the banker crossed out the figure and wrote in a higher one. Sugihara was even more dumbstruck and still couldn’t respond. The banker crossed out the number and wrote in a third amount. “Yeah!” Sugihara blurted out.